I learned about a neato genealogy site today called Geni. Thanks Lou! This site appeals to me on many levels. First, it's family history. I am such my father's child in that I get totally excited about genealogy stuff. I love filling in the forms and building the trees and seeing how everyone is connects. Yes, I know I'm weird.
Second, it's a nicely done site with lots of Ajaxy-goodness. They walk you through the process step by step, but in a gentle manner. There are a lot of nice touches, such as you are never asked to set a password. Rather, a password is created for you and mailed to you in a behind the scenes step (the email just appears in your inbox while you are playing with the site). If you want to create your own password, one of your set-up steps you are prompted to do is to confirm a permanent password. This is a housekeeping task that shouldn't get in the way of you using the site, and Geni does a great job of doing just that.
You spend a lot of time in the tree view adding folks and defining relationships. They have pared down the amount that you have to enter to get up and running. You don't need everyone's birthday and where they got married in order to add them to the system. In fact, unless you go into a detailed view you'd never know that you should have that information.
The tree view also automatically adjusts itself as you add more people. So my second cousins are collapsed when you are looking at my brother's kids. You can still get to them, but chances are it's just noise in the branches so they discreetly hide them.
The one thing that I don't like about the site so far is that amount of auto-complete breaks down at a crucial level. You tab through the fields entering country and state information, all of which has the standard auto-complete. But when you get to towns, you have to type the whole name of the town into the field. This is something that Family Tree Maker actually got right. A vast majority of family members are all in the same town. Sure spouses are likely to come from other places, but siblings are likely all born in the same place. Why not remember the towns of closely related family members and pre-populate the fields for me? Or even have an auto-complete for towns made up of all the towns I have entered so far. It gets tiring to have to type "Stamford" over and over and over.
I'm actually thinking of changing the genealogy site that I put together, Berlingo-Nardozza.com to just point to this one. Everyone in the family can edit it, so it's bound to be more up to date than what I can do. Bring the power to the people, so to speak.
